His father-
“Academician!” Buta Fyrnix’s penetrating voice snatched him away from his thoughts.
“Uh, that tour of the precincts. I, I really don’t feel-”
“Oh, that is not possible, I fear. A domestic disturbance, most unfortunate.” She hurried on. “I do want you to speak with our tiktok engineers. They have devised new autonomous tiktoks. They say they can maintain control using only three basic laws-imagine! “
Dors could not mask her surprise. She opened her mouth, hesitated, closed it. Hari also felt alarm, but Buta Fyrnix went right on, bubbling over new ventures on the Sarkian horizon. Then her eyebrows lifted and she said brightly, “Oh, yes-I do have even more welcome news. An Imperial squadron has just come to call.”
“Oh?” Dors shot back. “Under whose command?”
“A Ragant Divenex, sector general. I just spoke to him-”
“Damn!” Dors said. “He’s a Lamurk henchman.”
“You’re sure?” Hari asked. He knew her slight pause had been to consult her internal files.
Dors nodded. Buta Fyrnix said calmly, “Well, I am sure he will be honored to take you back to Trantor when you are finished with your visit here. Which we hope will not be soon, of-”
“He mentioned us?” Dors asked.
“He asked if you were enjoying-”
“Damn!” Hari said.
“A sector general commands all the wormlinks, if he wishes-yes?” Dors asked.
“Well, I suppose so.” Fyrnix looked puzzled.
“We’re trapped,” Hari said.
Fyrnix’s eyes widened in shock. “But surely you, a First Minister candidate, need fear no-”
“Quiet.” Dors silenced the woman with a stern glance. “At best this Divenex will bottle us up here.”
“At worst, there will be an ‘accident,”‘ Hari said.
“Is there no other way to get off Sark?” Dors demanded of Fyrnix.
“No, I can’t recall-”
“Think!”
Startled, Fyrnix said, “Well, of course, we do have privateers who at times use the wild worms, but-”
3.
In Hari’s studies he had discovered a curious little law. Now he turned it in his favor.
Bureaucracy increases as a doubling function in time, given the resources. At the personal level, the cause was the persistent desire of every manager to hire at least one assistant. This provided the time constant for growth.
Eventually this collided with the carrying capacity of society. Given the time constant and the capacity, one could predict a plateau level of bureaucratic overhead-or else, if growth persisted, the date of collapse. Predictions of the longevity of bureaucracydriven societies fit a precise curve. Surprisingly, the same scaling laws worked for microsocieties such as large agencies.
The corpulent Imperial bureaus on Sark could not move swiftly. Sector General Divenex’s squadron had to stay in planetary space, since it was paying a purely formal visit. Niceties were still observed. Divenex did not want to use brute force when a waiting game would work.
“I see. That gives us a few days,” Dors concluded.
Hari nodded. He had done the required speaking, negotiating, dealing, promising favors-all activities he disliked intensely. Dors had done the background digging. “To…?”
“Train. “
Wormholes were labyrinths, not mere tunnels with two ends. The large ones held firm for perhaps billions of years-none larger than a hundred meters across had yet collapsed. The smallest could sometimes last only hours, at best a year. In the thinner worms, flexes in the wormwalls during passage could alter the end point of a traveler’s trajectory.
Worse, worms in their last stages spawned transient, doomed young-the wild worms. As deformations in space-time, supported by negative energy-density “struts,” wormholes were inherently rickety. As they failed, smaller deformations twisted away.
Sark had seven wormholes. One was dying. It hung a light-hour away, spitting out wild worms that ranged from a hand’s-width size, up to several meters.
A fairly sizable wild worm had sprouted out of the side of the dying worm several months before. The Imperial squadron did not know of this, of course. All worms were taxed, so a free wormhole was a bonanza. Reporting their existence, well, often a planet simply didn’t get around to that until the wild worm had fizzled away in a spray of subatomic surf.
Until then, pilots carried cargo through them. That wild worms could evaporate with only seconds’ warning made their trade dangerous, highly paid, and legendary.
Wormriders were the sort of people who as children liked to ride their bicycles no-handed, but with a difference-they rode off rooftops.
By an odd logic, that kind of child grew up and got trained and even paid taxes-but inside, they stayed the same.
Only risk takers could power through the chaotic flux of a transient worm and take the risks that worked, not take those that didn’t, and live. They had elevated bravado to its finer points.
“This wild worm, it’s tricky,” a grizzled woman told Hari and Dors. “No room for a pilot if you both go.”
“We must stay together,” Dors said with finality.
“Then you’ll have to pilot.”
“We don’t know how,” Hari said.
“You’re in luck.” The lined woman grinned without humor. “This wildy’s short, easy.”
“What are the risks?” Dors demanded stiffly. “I’m not an insurance agent, lady.”
“I insist that we know-”
“Look, lady, we’ll teach you. That’s the deal.”
“I had hoped for a more-”
“Give it a rest, or it’s no deal at all.”
4.
In the men’s room, above the urinal he used, Hari saw a small gold plaque: Senior Pilot Joquan Beunn relieved himself here Octdent 4, 13,435.
Every urinal had a similar plaque. There was a washing machine in the locker room with a large plaque over it, reading The entire 43rd Pilot Corps relieved themselves here Marlass 18, 13,675.
Pilot humor. It turned out to be absolutely predictive. He messed himself on his first training run.
As if to make the absolutely fatal length of a closing wormhole less daunting, the worm flyers had escape plans. These could only work in the fringing fields of the worm, where gravity was beginning to warp, and space-time was only mildly curved. Under the seat was a small, powerful rocket that propelled the entire cockpit out, automatically heading away from the worm.
There is a limit to how much self-actuated tech one can pack into a small cockpit, though. Worse, worm mouths were alive with electrodynamic “weather”-writhing forks of lightning, blue discharges, red magnetic whorls like tornadoes. Electrical gear didn’t work well if a bad storm was brewing at the mouth. Most of the emergency controls were manual. Hopelessly archaic, but unavoidable.
So he and Dors went through a training program. Quite soon it was clear that if he used the Eject command he had better be sure that he had his head tilted back. That is, unless he wanted his kneecaps to slam up into his chin, which would be unfortunate, because he would be trying to check if his canopy had gone into a spin. This would be bad news, because his trajectory might get warped back into the worm. To correct any spin he had to yank on a red lever, and if that failed he had to then very quickly-in pilot’s terms, this meant about half a second-punch two blue knobs. When the spindown came, he then had to be sure to release the automatic actuator by pulling down on two yellow tabs, being certain that he sit up straight with hands between knees to avoid…
“.and so on for three hours. Everyone seemed to assume that since he was this famous mathematician he could of course keep an entire menu of instructions straight, timed to fractions of seconds.
After the first ten minutes he saw no point in destroying their illusions, and simply nodded and squinted to show that he was carefully keeping track and absolutely enthralled. Meanwhile he solved differential equations in his head for practice.